An apparent fall in cocaine production conceals the remarkable resilience of an illegal industry

A YEAR ago when the United Nations' annual survey showed a rise of 27% in the area planted with coca in Colombia in 2007, the government expressed “serious doubts” about the reliability of the estimate. On June 19th Colombian officials were so proud of the UN's finding of an 18% decrease last year that they rushed to announce it five days ahead of its scheduled release. Although cultivation of coca, the hardy shrub from which cocaine is refined, is reported to have increased in Peru and Bolivia (see chart), the UN claims that lower yields mean that 28% less cocaine was produced in Colombia. Taken together with an estimated fall of 19% in opium-poppy cultivation in Afghanistan, the UN's Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) calls the results “encouraging”.

That is surely welcome for UNODC, especially because it comes as the agency's worldwide policy of drug prohibition, reaffirmed at a ministerial meeting in April, is being increasingly questioned in Latin America and beyond (see article). In fact, there may be less to the headline figures than meets the eye.

Two things seem to lie behind the fall in coca cultivation in Colombia. Aldo Lale-Demoz, the UNODC's man in Bogotá, says the main factor is a greater stress on manual eradication, where workers physically yank up the coca, bush by bush, often in small plots on steep Andean mountainsides. This is more effective than aerial spraying, in which planes dump weedkiller, killing a harvest (and nearby food crops) but not the shrubs. On taking office in 2002, Álvaro Uribe, Colombia's president, launched a massive programme of aerial spraying. Last year the government still sprayed 133,000 hectares (330,000 acres), though this was 13% less than in 2007. But it also manually eradicated 95,634 hectares, a rise of 43% compared with 2007.

A second factor, according to Ricardo Vargas, a drug-policy analyst, was the success of the security forces in reducing the FARC guerrillas, disrupting their control of territory and their drug-production operation. This allowed the government to get eradication teams into the eastern province of Meta, where coca has long been widely grown, and to pull up half of the crop there.

Progress in Colombia is partly offset by developments further south. Peru's steady upward trend in coca cultivation continued, even though President Alan García's government manually eradicated 10,143 hectares last year. Output is rising fast in the Apurímac and Ene valleys, which not coincidentally are home to part of the remnants of the Maoist Shining Path guerrillas, who terrorised Peru in the 1980s and 1990s. Nearly 40 soldiers and police have been killed in the area since the government began an attempt to regain control last September. In the Huallaga valley further north, where the Shining Path is also present, the government has pressed ahead with forced eradication, but in the Apurímac and Ene it feared social unrest.

Cultivation has also risen in Bolivia, but not by much, despite the government's expulsion last year of America's Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), whose agents it accused of meddling. Bolivia's president, Evo Morales, who doubles as the leader of the coca-growers' union, insists that he is opposed to cocaine, though not to coca (which is traditionally chewed by Andean Indians). Both drug seizures and the number of anti-drug operations by Bolivia's police have increased under Mr Morales, though from a low base. The police recently destroyed a huge Colombian-run cocaine laboratory. But the lab's existence seemed to confirm the worries of American officials that despite these efforts the government's friendliness to coca growers helps the drug traffickers.

The apparent fall in coca production comes amid signs that Mexico's crackdown against drug gangs has had an effect in the United States, the biggest retail market for cocaine. America's DEA reports that the average purity of the cocaine it seized on the streets fell from 67% in January 2007 to 44% in December 2008, while the average retail price doubled to $200 per gram of pure cocaine. However, there have been several upward spikes in the retail price over the past two decades that have bucked but not broken a long-term falling trend. The retail price has recently also risen in Europe.

But it would be wildly premature to conclude from this year's figures that the Andean coca industry is in retreat. To sustain the fall in coca cultivation in Colombia requires the rule of law to take deeper root in rural areas, for eradication to be backed by offers of “alternative livelihoods” for coca farmers, as well as for demand for cocaine to continue to fall, says Sandeep Chawla, the UNODC's director of policy and public affairs.

In Meta Colombia's government has been quick to offer alternatives to coca. In Peru's Huallaga valley over the past two decades the authorities have helped thousands of farmers to replace 81,000 hectares of coca with alternatives such as coffee, cacao, rubber and oil palm. This success, says Rómulo Pizarro, who heads Peru's anti-drug agency, is because the farmers, different levels of government and foreign donors all worked together. Last month ministers unveiled a $115m plan to improve social provision and roads in the Apurímac and Ene valleys. But local mayors say that is not enough to counter the lure of drug trafficking. Experience shows that alternative development works only where it goes hand in hand with security and transport links to markets.

The problem is that the drug industry reacts to eradication programmes by pushing into new territory. The UN says that 59% of the coca it detected in Colombia last year was in areas where the crop had never before been planted. Now coca is springing up in several far-flung parts of Peru, including some national parks in the jungle. Adam Isacson, who follows Colombia for the Center for International Policy, a think-tank in Washington, DC, says that coca cultivation could well rise this year, because the FARC has regained control of some areas and because farmers lost their life savings in the collapse of financial pyramid schemes late last year. This week seven police died in a FARC ambush.

Estimates of drug production are far from foolproof. The UN derives its data from satellite photography, taken in December each year, backed up by field visits to sample sites. This methodology is more thorough than that used by America's Central Intelligence Agency, which provides the United States' government's estimates of drug production. But coca growers adapt to eradication by switching to smaller plots that are harder to spot.

Another doubt concerns how much cocaine is manufactured each year. Just as wine vintages vary, so the weather can affect the number of harvests a coca plant yields and the alkaloid content of the leaves. And the effectiveness (or lack of it) of law enforcement can determine how much is processed. By interviewing some coca farmers, the UN concluded that yields fell in Colombia this year. This leads it to estimate that cocaine production last year totalled just 845 tonnes (down from 994 tonnes last year).

Mr Chawla concedes that this is an “uncertain measure”. There is much anecdotal evidence pointing to rising productivity. Eradication teams in Colombia talk of finding high-density coca fields in new areas, and more use of fertiliser by growers. Yields in the Apurímac and Ene valleys, where cultivation is expanding, are among the highest in the Andes.

All this counsels against reading too much into this year's figures. Broadly speaking, the picture is one of a remarkable resilience in coca and cocaine production, despite enormous and hugely expensive efforts by governments to stamp it out. That resilience comes at a high cost in lives and environmental destruction.